Below I give you the lyrics from four songs regularly played on the radio in England.
All four contain an offensive word (to a greater or lesser degree) so, as with the football scores on the nine o'clock news, those who do not want to know the results should look away now:
1) I'll be burning rubber, you'll be kissing my ass.
2) Always up for a laugh, she's a pain in the arse.
3) The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap.
4) And hell yeah! I'm the motherfucking princess!
Only one of the four lyrics is sung as I've typed it above. The other three have their undesireable word edited. Which one escapes the wrath of the censor?
The answer is 1). In 2), the word 'arse' is considered too risqué for UK ears, whilst in 3) we cannot be heard to be advocating the use of drugs! 4) is probably self-explanatory, but the interest lies in the fact that 'motherfucking' is overwritten with actual words and not the mere smearing of sound - hell yeah! I'm the one and only princess!
Why can the inhabitants of our little island be fed the Americanism 'ass,' but the British 'arse,' from which the former is presumably derived, crosses the line of taste and decency?
What, furthermore, does it say about Blogger.com that I can type expletives on here to my heart's content? Presumably the biggest concern of the people running the site is that I may or may not have infringed copyright by disseminating lyrics!
What does it mean to censor something? It is, in effect, preventing the individual from re-committing a crime against the self. When one first is made aware that the word 'fuck' is not to be used aloud, one experiences a frisson of pleasure whenever it is heard. This is the crime, as understood by censors - they exist to snuff out the pleasure of particular words.
